It was an expressive, nay, eloquent, look of envy and admiration that my friend gave me, when it came time for him to leave me to my own devices for the forenoon, while he went reluctantly to school. Even to this moment I cannot say that I covet the amount of knowledge he carried away from his books that day, or, indeed, the succeeding three days.
I sallied stealthily forth to amuse myself in the by-streets till he came back at noon to bring my dinner; which consisted of a repetition of the breakfast, with the added dessert of an apple. This latter he carried carefully in his hand, but the bread-and-butter he invariably bore stowed away in his trousers pocket; I say invariably, for I lived two or three days thus on his secret bounty.
About dusk of the second evening he came to me with—in addition to the bread-and-butter for my supper—the startling news, that he was going to take me to the theatre. I do not remember how we got in,—it was not, certainly, by paying our way. I incline to the opinion that my friend had some secret understanding with the door-tender. I know merely that, by some means, we achieved our entrance to the pit of the old Eagle Street Theatre.
I have heard good citizens of Buffalo complain that, since Lola Montez burned down that seat of the histrionic Muse, the drama has languished in their city. Of course I am not competent to decide in such matters; but, that being the first playhouse of any kind I ever entered, I am glad to be able to say that I have never since seen anything in the theatrical line so absorbingly thrilling, or so gorgeously magnificent, as the old Eagle Street Theatre was to me that night. The name and plot of the play I have forgotten; but the dark frown of that smooth villain in the third act—where his villany first began to show itself to my unpractised comprehension—will never fade from my remembrance.
I do not know how it was, but up to that time I recollect I was under the juvenile impression that virtue and correct grammar always went together. I can therefore convey no idea of the shock with which I learned so late in the play, that the splendidly dressed man who could talk such eloquent, persuasive language, and withal in such scrupulous conformity to that most difficult of rules which keeps the verb under the regimental discipline of its subject-nominative,—that the man whose plaintive periods sometimes rose to the iambic majesty of blank verse, and who never got a case or tense wrong, howsoever wild, ecstatic, or dithyrambic his utterances of devotion to that innocent, long-suffering angel, the walking-lady,—that this man, I say, should nevertheless turn out to be a monster, whom, to borrow a little from his style of phraseology, it were mild flattery to call the greatest and vilest of rogues.
My memory of the whole evening is swallowed up in the overwhelming shock of that sad surprise. The grammatical Arcadia of my boyish belief was laid waste as with an earthquake.
The next morning, after I had eaten my usual bread-and-butter with more than usual appetite, I received a few choice friends at my lodgings in the hay-mow, and we had a consultation.
It was suggested that I was too near my former haunts to be safe. Indeed, rumors of an actual search for me had reached the ears of one boy, of whom, oddly enough, I can recall nothing more now than that those ears of his were remarkably large ones, and stood out prominently from each side of his head; that the best and most picturesque view of those ears was, in my opinion, to be had from my desk just behind him at school; and that I was especially attracted and edified by my observations upon them immediately after he had had his hair clipped short.
Those are grotesque pranks, by the way, which the memory sometimes plays us when we attempt to grope back too far. Another one of those daring spirits, for instance, who was loudest, and therefore, I fear, most influential, with his counsels that morning in the hay-mow has faded, as to body, name, and station, wholly from my mind, and exists to me now literally as a cherub with a mammoth straw hat for wings. From anything that I can positively remember, I would not be prepared to take my oath that he ever had any arms, legs, or trunk at all. I can recall only his big, round, staring eyes, which stood out at the tops of his puffy cheeks like a couple of glass knobs, and his red hair, whose decisive, precipitate ending all around his head left a queer impression that rats, or some larger and more ferocious animal, had been his barber. I forget now whether it was in sport or earnest that I used to say to myself, that boy’s hair had been “chawed off.”
It must have been that his facial aspect, heightened, of course, by his winged straw hat, aided him materially in the expression of his fears with regard to my safety; for this cherubic Agamemnon carried every point in that council of war; and it was unanimously resolved that I should change my quarters.